TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

what had been done to it? seeing how old Kennedy
was supposed to have charge of it, and then his
leg got so bad after he fell from the cart; and
perhaps then no one for a year, or the better part
of one; and then Davie Macdonald, and seeds
might be sent, but who should say if they were
ever planted? They'd find it changed.

She watched her son scything. He was a great
one for work—one of those quiet ones. Well
they must be getting along with the cupboards,
she supposed. They hauled themselves up.

At last, after days of labour within, of cutting
and digging without, dusters were flicked from
the windows, the windows were shut to, keys were
turned all over the house; the front door was
banged; it was finished.

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing
and the scything and the mowing had drowned
it there rose that half-heard melody, that inter-
mittent music which the ear half catches but
lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregular, intermittent,
yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the
tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet somehow
belonging; the jar of a dor beetle, the squeak of a
wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which
the ear strains to bring together and is always on
the verge of harmonising but they are never quite
heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the
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